Every article about Perl leads to the same pattern of comments. Most people think Perl is horrible and lends itself to incomprehensible code. And Perl people have their backs against a wall, furiously defending their language with prevarications like Perl had the "misfortune" of being the only dynamic language on the block for a long time, leading to many people reaching for it to get things done without bothering to actually learn the language, thus creating a vast corpus of low quality code.
Sure, couldn't have anything to do with the language. The whole rest of the world just doesn't get it.
I think it's more a case of people think they understand Perl, or can make assumptions because of their existing C/PHP/Shell programming experience and apply it to Perl without problem, and that is not always the case. The fact is, Perl is fundamentally different, but looks just similar enough to fool people.
If it looked like Lisp, people would be less likely to think that it's just a matter of applying their C experience, but alas, it generally looks pretty familiar, if a bit messy, to users of other imperative languages.
If you are trying to understand, write or change a Perl script, and you don't know what context a statement takes place in, or what I mean by context in this case, then you don't know what you are doing. (I mean you in the general sense, not as an indictment against the parent).
> The whole rest of the world just doesn't get it.
Never claimed that. If you read the quote you chose, you will find that i claimed that many did not even bother to try and get it, because they got things done and did not have any reason to get it.
Sure, couldn't have anything to do with the language. The whole rest of the world just doesn't get it.